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Ken Gass launches his Canadian Rep Theatre season

Director fired by Factory Theatre in 2012 brings new works by Wajdi Mouawad, George F. Walker and Judith Thompson to Toronto venues

Director Ken Gass, right, with cast members of Pacamambo, the first show of his revived Canadian Rep Theatre. From left, Michelle Polak, Karen Robinson, Amy Keating and Kyra Harper. (CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

That’s why the veteran theatre director, much in the headlines over the past year and a half due to his firing from Factory Theatre in June 2012, is re-establishing his Canadian Rep Theatre this year with three scripts from three of the best authors this country has: Wajdi Mouawad, George F. Walker and Judith Thompson.

Pacamambo, by Mouawad, will open the season on Jan. 18 at The Citadel performance space in Regent Park.

Gass has been keeping a low profile since the Factory debacle, which took place after a quarrel with the board of directors, largely over questions of how the theatre’s heritage restoration grant was to be used.

Gass was summarily dismissed from the organization he had founded in the 1970s and then returned to in the mid-’90s to save from bankruptcy.

After a bitter controversy, which saw many of the artists Gass had scheduled jumping ship to declare their loyalty, Nina Lee Aquino and Nigel Shawn Williams were appointed as artistic directors to try and rebuild the organization.

Gass has come to peace with the situation and put it behind him.

“I’m completely separated from them and we’re working in different worlds,” he says.

“I have no contact with the Factory and they have no contact with me. That’s the only way I can move forward and function.”

Considering the bill of plays he’s presenting, it’s easy to understand his desire for forward motion.

After Mouawad’s play, Gass will present Judith Thompson’s controversial one-woman show about mentally ill prisoners, Watching Glory Die, at the Berkeley Street Theatre from May 15 to June 1.

And for a knockout finale, George F. Walker’s latest script about a returning veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, Dead Metaphor, will be part of the off-Mirvish season at the Panasonic Theatre from May 20 to June 8. It received rave reviews in its world premiere in San Francisco last year.

“With this season, I’m unabashedly saying that I’m putting my faith and trust in our authors and the excitement created when our great actors work with them,” Gass says on a break from rehearsals.

Mouawad is known for searing, multi-level adult dramas like Scorched, but Pacamambo is something different: a play originally written for young audiences, but with the author’s customary intensity.

“It’s a fascinating play I’ve wanted to do for some time,” says Gass. “It deals very powerfully with the notion of death and, in a way, that takes it totally out of the realm of the conventional theatre for young audiences show. In fact, we’ve got some college kids coming to see it in a group, which I think will be a fascinating experience.”

Gass acknowledges he had a deliberate strategy beginning with this script, because, “We wanted to launch with a play that would encourage us to connect to the community in a wider way.”

But Gass sees all this as just the beginning.

“I want to look at the existing Canadian repertoire and build a company around it. Let’s define the canon. Let’s look at plays that have been done by other companies and give them a new examination.

“There’s great Canadian work being done around the country and I want us to embrace it all. I’d like us to be a company like Soulpepper, only devoted exclusively to Canadian plays.”

One of Gass’s current dreams involves a reinvestigation of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs, set in “the changing racial world of Toronto in the 1960s,” with actors like Karen Robinson and Yanna MacIntosh on his dream cast list.

“But good ideas are three for a quarter,” laughs Gass. “The trick is finding the resources to do them.”

One might also ask why Gass is still so obsessed about theatre at the age of 68, when most men would be negotiating tee times in Florida, but he has a simple answer.

“I’ve always been driven by the work,” he says, and Canadian theatre has been the richer for it.

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